Britt

“Don’t worry bro, just look at how we do it!” 

The man crying is George Gillette, tribal chairman of the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa tribes of North Dakota in 1948. He was forced under the threat of death of all his people to sign over the tribes’ homeland on the fertile floodplain of the Missouri River in order to build the Garrison Dam.

The final settlement legislation denied tribes’ right to use the reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting, fishing or other purposes, including irrigation development and royalty rights on all subsurface minerals within the reservoir area.

After the dam was constructed, the three tribes were scattered, their communities and extended families flung to different shores of the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea.

After a long time of not doing anything because I am the worst, you can now BUY A MISS TRANSLATED CHAPBOOK:

It’s an ebook you can get ON AMAZON (sorry). Click on that sexy link, pay $2.99, and YOU can get all of the following:

9 poems from the miss translated series, one of which is NEW and NEVER BEFORE SEEN OR PUBLISHED ooooooh

the ones everybody seems to like, like la sirena y el pescador and el vampiro/ICE. 

a slightly tinytext experience because it turns out it is VERY HARD to format these bananas line breaks for a book?? I tried zooming in on my phone and that seemed to work fine.

the knowledge that you are helping an amazing immigrant rights group created by and for immigrants, new sanctuary coalition. you may have read about their executive director, Ravi Ragbir, being seized by ICE and threatened with deportation until community pressure caused them to back off. 100% of the profits from this chapbook will be going to this group. (Full disclosure: My mother works for New Sanctuary, and I’ve volunteered there doing everything from childcare to data entry. I love the community NSC has created and I think they do fabulous, empowering work.)

If you love physical artifacts and holding books in your hands, i feel you. If you buy the chapbook, I will absolutely send you the PDF for printing. I want people to have this chapbook. I want people to talk about this chapbook. Our immigrant friends in NSC’s community are terrified and vulnerable, and this is what my mother asked me to do to help them, so whatever I can do to make it easier for you to support NSC, let me know.

tl;dr: IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. BUY THE MISS TRANSLATED EBOOK. GET A NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN POEM. PLEASE REBLOG.